Enter your mobile number or email address below and we'll send you a link to download the free Kindle App. Then you can start reading Kindle books on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.

This volume contributes to a growing reevaluation of the Brezhnev era, helping to shape a new historiography that gives us a much richer and more nuanced picture of the time period than the stagnation paradigm usually assigned to the era. The essays provide a multifaceted prism that reveals a dynamic society with a political and intellectual class that remained committed to the ideological foundations of the state, recognized the challenges that the system faced, and embarked on a creative search for solutions. The chapters focus on developments in politics, society, and culture, as well as the state’s attempts to lead and initiate change, which are mostly glossed over in the stagnation narrative. The volume challenges the assumption that the period as a whole was characterized by rampant cynicism and a decline of faith in the socialist creed and instead points to the persistence of popular engagement with the socialist ideology and the power it continued to wield within the Soviet Union.

Editorial Reviews

Review

This is a welcome addition to the body of literature reexamining the Brezhnev era. It portrays an engaged citizenry in dialog with public institutions and a state still capable of innovation from science to foreign affairs. (Peter Rutland, Wesleyan University)

Reconsidering Stagnation in the Brezhnev Era, which transcends preceding scholarship on those years, is a much needed revisionist book of new information, approaches, and interpretations. Subjects range from high politics, economics, and society to culture, from private lives to public policy, and the collection includes an excellent introductory overview by Dina Fainberg and Artemy Kalinovsky. Reconsidering Stagnation in the Brezhnev Era is an important contribution to our understanding both of Soviet and post-Soviet history. (Stephen F. Cohen, Princeton University and New York University)